We were so poor we envied everyone we ever heard of.

If you are being run out of town, get in front of the crowd and make it look like a parade.

It doesn't take much to produce a good merchant of cash-and-carry love: just courage, an infinite capacity for perpetual suspicion, stamina on a 24-hour-a-day basis, the deathless conviction that the customer is always wrong, a fair knowledge of first and second aid, do-it-yourself gynecology, judo - and a tremendous sense of humor.

Like I always say, if you sit long enough by the crack of the door, you'll see your enemy go by in a hearse.

[On entering the restaurant business:] Food has the dubious advantage of being legitimate, and one's customers somehow manage to live longer without sex than food, if you call that living.

Madaming is the sort of thing that happens to you - like getting a battlefield commission or becoming the dean of women at Stanford University.

Well, there's a Book that says we're all sinners and I at least chose a sin that's made quite a few people happier than they were before they met me, a sin that's left me with very little time to consider other extremely popular moral misdemeanors, like usury, intolerance, bearing false tales, extortion, racial bigotry, and the casting of that first stone.